Borland to offer IDE for Microsoft's .Net

Borland Software Corp. is getting ready to go up against Microsoft Corp.'s Visual Studio .Net with an IDE (integrated development environment) for the Microsoft .Net Framework.

To be announced on Tuesday, Borland's Project Sidewinder IDE does not yet have a formal product name and will not ship until this summer. Sidewinder is a C#-based development environment for building applications on the .Net Framework, including on ASP.Net, ADO.Net, and WinForms, according to Borland.

"What Borland is focused on is the complete application lifecycle," for defining, designing, testing, and deploying applications, said Simon Thornhill, vice president of Borland's RAD business unit, in Scotts Valley, Calif. "What Borland is going to provide is a .Net application lifecycle solution."

Borland already offers an IDE for Java developers, called JBuilder. With Sidewinder, Borland intends to provide a platform for integration of tools from multiple vendors.

"Sidewinder will tightly integrate with those tools from other companies but also with tools from Borland, which is extremely important because a lot of customers lose time as they move between the different phases [of development]," Thornhill said. Development information, such as modeling of business requirements, can be lost as well, he said.

"We will provide tight integration between the modeling and the development environment," said Thornhill. Developers also will be able to integrate .Net applications with Java applications, enabling access to a Java payroll application by a .Net application, for example.

Sidewinder will provide tight integration with Borland products such as CalibreRM, for requirements management; StarTeam, for configuration management; and Together, for application lifecycle management. Sidewinder integration with Borland products will be tighter than with other vendors' products.

Application modeling will be supported, including support for Unified Modeling Language. Database integration also is featured.

"What we're providing is seamless integration in our solution to connect with Oracle and DB2 and other database vendors [products], including the Borland InterBase [database]," said Michael Swindell, director of products and technology in the RAD business at Borland.

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